


Fields upon fields

by Lia (Liafic)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-29
Updated: 2015-11-29
Packaged: 2018-05-03 21:56:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5308331
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liafic/pseuds/Lia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Not everything has to mean something, you know. We could just be friendly, just two people who work together.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fields upon fields

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to whoever nominated me. ♥ My prompt was “office parties”.

My grandparents lived in a farmhouse bordered by marshlands. It was an isolated part of the countryside where the houses were separated by miles of flooded muddy roads and fields of sweet grass, which I tramped across as a child whenever we packed up the car and made the long drive to visit them, two stoic people weathered by a world war and disinclined to change.

I brought you there in late autumn. Memories are such strange things—such unexpected things. For days beforehand all I could think about was the way the sun filtered through the checkered curtains over their kitchen sink or how the smell of juniper had settled into every corner of the place, and it was as though the whole house was waiting there inside me like the reminder of an unfinished book. 

In a way I suppose I had been saving it until last. I had packed up my parents’ flat almost immediately after the war because it was easier not to have something to come home to than to wander the empty halls until I could make myself understand they would never be coming back. That was before you knew me, really. 

_I was expecting more dust,_ you said after we whirled into existence in their foyer. It was so early in the morning that the cold weight of silence stretched for miles, and frost had settled over the fields. 

_No one has been here in years,_ I told you. _They both died before—well._

You ran your hands across the framed photos on the wall, strange still pictures leached of colour over the decades: my parents’ wedding, me in my reception uniform. You laughed at that one, a sharp exhale as your thumb brushed across my toothy child face. 

At the time, I thought I had brought you to distract me from the finality of it, boxing up everything so the house could finally be put up for sale after such a long hibernation, or perhaps I just wanted the freedom to be with you in a place where no one knew our names. Either way, you were a remarkably competent assistant, and the nights were filled with old pastel blankets, wet wood smoking in the fire—being alone together. 

_Is it really harming anyone to leave it here?_ you said. _You may want to come back someday, or your children._

I was curled against your shoulder, wrapped up in the warmth of you and the sound of rain on the windows. _I suppose so,_ I said, feigning reluctance though you were giving me the permission I had been searching for, and all at once the weight of the house dissipated like so many dust motes rising in the sunlight. _Yes, I suppose so._

· 

We have fallen into patterns, you and I. In the office we are civil, deliberately brusque, secure in our own secrets and the somewhat reassuring knowledge that it can never work out between us, not really. There are too many people to be let down, too many expectations to be shattered. I expect you see me as an amusing diversion, and I expect you expect I see you the same way. 

The holidays are tricky these days. I am effectively without family, so everyone I know has tried to adopt me, and I make the rounds like an eldest sibling’s jumper. The Burrow is loud and whirring, the flat Harry shares with Ginny smells like warm rum, and Neville makes pots of tea in the greenhouses at school and convinces me to mark his students’ papers with him when we fall into comfortable but somewhat laden silences. 

“Then I guess we should be miserable together this year,” you say when I tell you about it all, so I tell myself you mean it casually: together the way colleagues who occasionally sleep with one another are together. I tell myself winter is cold, and people get lonely—even you. 

I know things about you that no one else does, but I thrum with a constant low jealousy whenever we are around other people. The day after invitations to the Christmas party start flitting through the corridors, your shirtsleeves are rolled up and your hair is out of place, and when I see you something surges inside me so strongly that I almost panic at it: _Oh, maybe,_ I think, and it rushes through my body like the flood of nervous pain after narrowly avoiding a fall. 

· 

You held my hand when I made coffee in the morning, the grey sunlight filtering through your eyes. _We can never tell anyone, can we?_ you said, and I thought _No, never_ but spooned sugar into two mugs instead and looked away, grasping for something that would end the conversation quickly. 

_It won’t be like this forever._

You released me—together, not together. You said, _I don’t think it’s meant to be this hard._

· 

Ginny knows, if not the details then the shape of it, this formless feeling lurking somewhere in my mind. “You’re in love,” she tells me, cross legged on the floor of her kitchen while we wait for the oven timer to go off. 

“You’re giving me too much credit—like I could keep that sort of secret.” 

“You kept Viktor a secret for months, didn’t you?” 

“I was fourteen.” 

“Well, people don’t change—or not that much, anyway.” She tips the last of the bottle into our mugs and swirls hers around like a hypnotist. “You are and have always been almost fiercely private about these sorts of things.” 

“If I tell you you’re wrong, you won’t believe me.” 

“No,” she says. “I know you better than that.” 

I close my eyes in a long blink, smell baking cookies and honey. The hard weight of her head rests on my shoulder, and when I exhale and open my eyes again, the lights strung along their balcony have come on. In the sliding door reflection, we look like sleepy children. 

“Harry wants us to—he wants a family.” 

“Oh,” I tell her. “Is that . . . what you want?” 

“I don’t know. It would mean giving up my career, giving up lots of things.” 

“Maybe he hasn’t thought about it like that.” 

“I suppose,” she says. For a moment, she clenches her mug and breathes as though she is about to speak: determined. Then the timer buzzes, and she stands, and I have no choice but to follow. “Well, I don’t know what I want, anyway.” 

“No,” I tell her. “No, neither do I.” 

· 

I have been back to the farmhouse one time since the last. In the blue darkness of early winter, the outlines of things were unfamiliar. The staircase creaked when I walked up towards my grandparents’ bedroom, where I lay across the bare mattress and listened to the silence of snow. How strange that I could barely remember their faces. 

I wished we could start over—that I could be stronger, let things just exist the way they were. Normalcy was like that house, though, comforting and familiar, and I clung to it and clung to it until I had suffocated all the meaning from it. There was me and there was you, and there was an entire world of experiences between us like a chasm that could never be breached. 

I could still see you the way they all saw you, if I stopped trying not to: I saw a scared boy in a tower. I saw a coward who waited and waited until he no longer had to make a choice at all. 

The field behind the house was cold, and the snow was so thin that my footsteps left dark melted spots across the grass. I could run my fingers across it, close my eyes and imagine I was a child and the world was waiting for me. There were things to learn and places to see and people to fall in love with, and all of it was empty because none of them were you. 

_Hermione,_ you said. Across the field, your unexpected voice was as clear as the cry of a bird. 

_I don’t know what I’m doing here,_ I told you. _I don’t know what I was looking for._

You tramped out to join me, and we stood apart, together apart, and you said, _Just come home._

_Home,_ I thought. I reached across the distance between us until my fingers brushed yours. _Yes, home_ —the idea of it shimmering like a memory, like an impossible dream, like snow falling on fields upon fields. 

· 

Here in my flat in the heart of the city, the tiny white lights across the window twinkle over my reflection in the vanity mirror. I look presentable for a work party, I think, and on my bed your body is a still photograph where you sit and watch me. The whole world seems quieter in these moments, like the static on an old record. My cheeks are still hot. 

You say, “Are we actually going tonight, then?” 

“I guess we never talked about it.” 

“No, we never did.” 

I am purposely not looking at you, but I can see the corner of your mouth curving up, quirking as quick as a fox—annoyed, yes. You slide up behind me and sling your arm around my waist, your hand curling against the bottom of my ribs. 

What would it be like to show up together tonight, to possess one another publicly? In this alternate universe, there are loud carols and mistletoe, and someone brings in homemade cookies and someone drinks too much, and no one remembers what either of us has been through or done. 

“Not everything has to mean something, you know,” you say. “We could just be friendly, just two people who work together.” 

“Draco,” I say—not together, never together. Behind me, your body is solid and warm. It could all be so much easier if I only let it, but our reflections in the mirror look like two strangers, and the farmhouse is far away now. Another life full of other possibilities. 

You stand and pull your shirt on. My hair has already come loose from its bun, but I leave it because it feels like a secret I can keep. In a few minutes, it will be as though you were never here at all. 

“Maybe next year, then,” you say, and you hover in the doorway, your hand on the frame. 

“Yes,” I tell you. “Maybe next year.”


End file.
